'The Saga of a Whole People': Louis Golding's Rendering of Ashkenazi Jewish Experience in the Doomington Novels 1920-1954
This thesis presents a critical and important re-evaluation of the prolific and once popular writer Louis Golding (1896-1958). It argues that he has clear significance as an Anglo-Jewish middlebrow writer who presented key aspects of twentieth-century Ashkenazi Jewish experience to a general as well as a Jewish popular readership. Furthermore, it argues that the ‘Doomington’ novels, produced between 1921 and 1954, reveal Golding’s personal and political commitment to a sympathetic rendering of Jewish characters in the context of collective and personal experiences that range from the events of Pale of Settlement pogroms, through the dislocation of immigration, and culminate in the tragedy of the Holocaust. This thesis contributes to the expanding body of work on neglected twentieth-century middlebrow writers through a critical examination of Golding’s socio-historical and biographical context as well as a close reading of his poetry, journalism, and fiction. My over-arching argument is supported by previously under-used material, such as archives, family history records, reportage, and fiction co-texts, that all offer a greater awareness and understanding of Golding’s status as both an Anglo-Jewish and a middlebrow writer. Furthermore, this thesis sets out a new reading of Golding as a writer on the periphery of several discrete traditions – Jewish, modernist, middlebrow – and establishes his important contribution to the Anglo-Jewish and middlebrow canons as an informed and commercially successful chronicler of Ashkenazi Jewish experience. It places an emphasis on his personal and writerly hybridity, his trajectory from the margins of modernism to the popular middlebrow, and, most significantly, his status as one of the earliest contributors to Holocaust fiction written in English. As such, the thesis argues that although Golding has been critically overlooked, he occupies an exceptional place in the Anglo-Jewish literary tradition and the middlebrow popular canon.
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